


Spectral Hues

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-07
Updated: 2016-04-07
Packaged: 2018-05-31 20:12:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6485914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Color is something of a luxury, on Jakku. It stands out too much, Rey knows, against all the heat and light. It marks you as a somebody.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spectral Hues

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in response to the following prompt, which I found very interesting - "Rey has spent her whole life wearing colors that help her be camouflaged against a desert landscape. Someone gets her a brightly colored scarf or something, and she feels like she's in danger wearing it because she's easier to see and target.
> 
> Someone convinces her that it's safe to be seen now."
> 
> I hope this is something like what the prompter was looking for.

…  
  
The weaver of shrouds passes through Niima Outpost exactly once per year, shaking the dust from her unbound white hair before spreading out her wares for display. She does not deal exclusively in burial sheets, of course, her collapsible loom holds a half-finished bridal veil suspended between its strings, but on Jakku the dead are a much more stable market.  
  
Rey – thirteen, now, going by those tallies on her wall, although her body remains as flat and sparse as a weedy flower pushing its way through a cracked-dry lake bed – sneaks closer to run her hands over the smooth cloth.  
  
The colors are so bright, she thinks.  
  
She wishes she could hear them, smell them and put them in her mouth to taste. This red would sound like a flag, or a fire, tattering in the wind, while this blue would smell like rounded stones hauled up from the bottom of a deep, sandy pool. This yellow would taste like fresh-sliced fruit, eaten off the blade of a knife, bursting and new and biting-sweet. This purple would roll like thunder.  
  
“So are you looking or buying today, little steel-pecker?”  
  
Rey glances over. Her hands pause on a shroud that is gray-pink like the morning sky.  
  
The weaver is staring at her through dark eyes, puffing on the cigarra clasped between her thin lips. Rey knows what the woman must be seeing – burnt-freckled cheeks paled with dust, streaked with sweat, a mask half-pulled over her face, clothing the colors of midday sunlight and sand because that is what being a nobody in this place requires. Disguise, disguise, disguise, until one day you get so good at it that you disappear altogether.  
  
But being a nobody is safer, here, not to mention cheaper. Color is a sumptuary luxury which the living cannot usually afford.  
  
Then Rey snatches her hands away to wipe them on her dirty pants. Her thighs are bruised from scrambling through a narrow airshaft, and she frowns as she gives her answer.  
  
“Neither. I’m not dead yet.”  
  
…  
  
She presses the scarf against her chest and watches it unfurl, all the way down to her feet, and then looks at General Organa again.  
  
“You want me to have this?”  
  
“I’d like you to have it,” the General corrects, standing with her hands clasped together. “It’s windy, where you’re going next. You may need it.”  
  
Rey pauses.  
  
The fabric is vine-silk, covered in a pattern like briers and flowers. Clever threads of gold and silver have been woven through its deep green, so that the scarf glitters and sparks whichever way she turns it towards the light. Its color would sound like summer rain dripping off the leaves of a tree, would smell like fresh-turned soil and taste like – well. Rey does not have a great deal of experience with any of these things, and so she cannot be quite sure.  
  
_(“So are you looking or buying today, little steel-pecker?”)_  
  
And she cannot accept this, Rey almost says, though the kindness of it squeezes hard around her heart because it is the first gift she has ever gotten, but then remembers that she is traveling to a place of blue water and green islands and that she is not really a nobody, anymore.  
  
Not quite.  
  
“Rey?” the General asks. "Are you all right?"  
  
After another moment of reverent hesitation, Rey takes the scarf up by its corners and throws it about her shoulders like a mantle in one spinning, weightless flourish. She smiles.

 _(“Neither. I’m not dead yet.”)_  
  
“Yes,” she says. “Thank you very much.”  
  
…


End file.
